Keywords

The liver group in Tucson, Arizona, had great pleasure in hosting the 11th International Symposium on the Cells of the Hepatic Sinusoid and their Relation to Other Cells (ISCHS) from the 25th through 29th August, 2002.

In spite of the reduced travel resulting from the September 11, 2001 tragedy in New York City, we had a total participation by 102 delegates from around the world, representing Australia, Belgium, Brazil, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. In total, 6 tutorials, 36 platform presentations, and 37 poster presentations were made. I wish to thank all participants in the meeting, particularly those who gave lectures, papers, or presented posters, and especially those who also prepared their presentations for publication in these Proceedings. I also wish to thank the Scientific Organizing Committee (H. Jaeschke, M. Naito, Y. Shiratori, B. Smedsrød, F. Vidal-Vanaclocha, E. Wisse, R.S. McCuskey) for organizing the different scientific sessions and E. Rocha and E. Wisse for arranging the first electronic publication of the Proceedings of this series of Symposia. Finally, my special thanks to the dedicated work of S. Eastman and C. Martin for their extensive efforts in organizing both the Symposium and these Proceedings.

Final Remark

The Symposium was a great success and clearly highlighted the current status of research on sinusoidal lining cells as well as future directions. As a result, on behalf of the Scientific Organizing Committee, we hope that these Proceedings will encourage more research in the area of cells of the hepatic sinusoids and their interaction with other cells. We look forward to sharing new findings at the 12th ISCHS to be held in Bilbao, Spain in 2004 under the organization of Fernando Vidal-Vanaclocha and his colleagues.

Robert S. McCuskey

President of ISCHS

2000–2002

List of sessions and their contents

Opening Lecture:KARL WILHELM KUPFFER AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN HEPATOLOGY

Authors’ Affiliations

Copyright

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.